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John C. Harsanyi - Biographical

I was born in Budapest, Hungary,
on May 29, 1920. The high school my parents chose for me was the
Lutheran Gymnasium in Budapest, one of the best schools in
Hungary, with such distinguished alumni as John von Neumann and
Eugene Wigner. I
was very happy in this school and received a superb education. In
1937, the year I graduated from it, I won the First Prize in
Mathematics at the Hungary-wide annual competition for high
school students.

My parents owned a pharmacy in Budapest, which gave us a
comfortable living. As I was their only child, they wanted me to
become a pharmacist. But my own preference would have been to
study philosophy and mathematics. Yet, in 1937 when I actually
had to decide my field of study, I chose pharmacy in accordance
with my parents' wishes. I did so because Hitler was in power in
Germany, and his influence was steadily increasing also in
Hungary. I knew that as a pharmacy student I would obtain
military deferment. As I was of Jewish origin, this meant that I
would not have to serve in a forced labor unit of the Hungarian
army.

As a result, I did have military deferment until the German army
occupied Hungary in March 1944. Then I did have to serve in a
labor unit from May to November 1944.

In that November the Nazi authorities finally decided to deport
my labor unit from Budapest to an Austrian concentration camp,
where most of my comrades eventually perished. But I was lucky
enough to make my escape from the railway station in Budapest,
just before our train left for Austria. Then a Jesuit father I
had known gave me refuge in the cellar of their monastery.

In 1946 I re-enrolled at the University of Budapest in order to
obtain a Ph.D. in philosophy with minors in sociology and in
psychology. As I got credit for my prior studies in pharmacy, I
did get my Ph.D. in June 1947, after only one more year of course
work and after writing a dissertation in philosophy.

From September 1947 to June 1948 I served as a junior faculty
member at the University Institute of Sociology. There I met Anne
Klauber, a psychology student who attended a course I was
teaching and who later became my wife. But in June 1948, I had to
resign from the Institute because the political situation no
longer permitted them to employ an outspoken anti-Marxist as I
had been.

Yet Anne did go on with her studies. But she was continually
harassed by her Communist classmates to break up with me because
of my political views, but she did not. This made her realize,
before I did, that Hungary was becoming a completely Stalinist
country, and that the only sensible course of action for us was
to leave Hungary.

Actually we did so only in April 1950. We had to cross the
Hungarian border illegally over a marshy terrain, which was less
well guarded than other border areas. But even so, we were very
lucky not to be stopped or shot at by the Hungarian border
guards.

After waiting in Austria for our Australian landing permits for
several months, we actually reached Sydney, Australia, on
December 30, 1950. On January 2, 1951, Anne and I got married.
Her unfailing emotional support and her practical good sense have
always been a great help to me.

As my English was not very good and as my Hungarian university
degrees were not recognized in Australia, during most of our
first three years there I had to do factory work. But in the
evening I took economics courses at the University of
Sydney. (I changed over from sociology to economics because I
found the conceptual and mathematical elegance of economic theory
very attractive.) I was given some credit for my Hungarian
university courses so that I had to do only two years of further
course work and had to write an M.A. thesis in economics in order
to get an M.A. I did receive the degree late in 1953.

Early in 1954 I was appointed Lecturer in Economics at the
University of
Queensland in Brisbane. Then, in 1956, I was awarded a
Rockefeller Fellowship, enabling me and Anne to spend two years
at Stanford
University, where I got a Ph.D. in economics, whereas Anne
got an M.A. in psychology. I had the good fortune of having
Ken Arrow as advisor and as
dissertation supervisor. I benefitted very much from discussing
many finer points of economic theory with him. But I also
benefitted substantially by following his advice to spend a
sizable part of my Stanford time studying mathematics and
statistics. These studies proved very useful in my later work in
game theory.

In 1958 Anne and I returned to Australia, where I got a very
attractive research position at the Australian National
University in Canberra. But soon I felt very isolated because
at that time game theory was virtually unknown in Australia. I
turned to Ken Arrow for help. With his and Jim Tobin's help, I was appointed
Professor of Economics at Wayne State University in Detroit. Then, in 1964, I
became at first Visiting Professor and then Professor at the
Business School of the University of California in Berkeley. Later my
appointment was extended also to the Department of Economics. Our
only child Tom was born in Berkeley.

In the early 1950s I published papers on the use of von
Neumann-Morgenstern utility functions in welfare economics and in
ethics and on the welfare economics of variable tastes.

My interest in game-theoretic problems in a narrower sense was
first aroused by John Nash's four
brilliant papers, published in the period 1950-53, on cooperative
and on noncooperative games, on two-person bargaining games and
on mutually optimal threat strategies in such games, and on what
we now call Nash equilibria.

In 1956 I showed the mathematical equivalence of Zeuthen's and of
Nash's bargaining models and stated algebraic criteria for
optimal threat strategies.

In 1963 I extended the Shapely value to games without
transferable utility and showed that my new solution concept was
a generalization both of the Shapley value and of Nash's
bargaining solution with variable threats.

In a three-part paper published in 1967 and 1968, I showed how to
convert a game with incomplete information into one with complete
yet imperfect information, so as to make it accessible to
game-theoretic analysis.

In 1973 I showed that "almost all" mixed-strategy Nash equilibria
can be reinterpreted as pure-strategy strict equilibria of a
suitably chosen game with randomly fluctuating payoff
functions.

I also published a number of papers on utilitarian ethics.

I published four books. One of them, Rational Behavior and
Bargaining Equilibrium in Games and Social Situations (1977),
was an attempt to unify game theory by extending the use of
bargaining models from cooperative games also to noncooperative
games. Two books, Essays on Ethics, Social Behavior, and
Scientific Explanation (1976), and Papers in Game
Theory (1982), were collections of some of my journal
articles. Finally, A General Theory of Equilibrium Selection
in Games (1988) was a joint work with Reinhard Selten. Its title indicates its
content.

Let me add that in 1993 and 1994 I wrote two, as yet unpublished
papers, proposing a new theory of equilibrium selection. My 1993
paper does so for games with complete information, while my 1994
paper does so for games with incomplete information. My new
theory is based on our 1988 theory but is a much simpler theory
and is in my view an intuitively more attractive one.

I am a member of the National Academy of Sciences, and a Fellow of the
American Academy
of Arts and Sciences and of the Econometric Society, as well
as a Distinguished Fellow of the American Economic Association. In 1965-66 I was a
Fellow of the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral
Sciences at Stanford. I have an honorary degree of Doctor of
Science from Northwestern University. After my retirement from my
university, Reinhard Selten edited a volume in my honor with the
help of H. W. Brock. It has the title, Rational
Interaction.

This autobiography/biography was written
at the time of the award and later published in the book series Les
Prix Nobel/Nobel Lectures/The Nobel Prizes. The information is sometimes updated with an addendum submitted
by the Laureate.